Marriage Counselling

Regardless if you live in a relationship with or without paper, married or defacto, what makes it work remains the same.

RESPECT!

A good relationship is one where the love and respect one has for the other exceeds the need one has for the other, or more colloquial, that there is respect for the others way of thinking and acting, rather than that the other is there to fill a gap in your life. Simply realizing this and living by it can save your marriage and help you avoid paying for marriage counselling in the first place.

In our experience the reason why couples have issues and seek marriage counselling in the first place are along these lines:

You or the other has done something the other cannot forgive.

The person you are in a relationship with is someone that do not respect you, so all there is in the relationship is sexual infatuation and habit.

The romantic phase is over, and many don't know that that is when true relationships begin, they are yearning for the butterflies. The relationship is in a crisis.

You take it for granted that your partner thinks like you, and feel hurt when he or she does not react to your clues.

Before we even look at marriage counselling, its worthwhile to look at why people seek partnerts in the first place so we've listed the 3 main reasons below:

Loneliness.

Polarity, the female needs a male, the male a female.

Friendship.

You can be lonely among a crowd of wellmeaning friends, while you may not feel alone even if you are alone physically. This seeming contradiction is because loneliness basically is that we do not like our own compagny, or do not find it suffficient.

For a really lasting and meaningful relationship to develop, it is important to understand three basic laws governing our psyche, the law of ressonance, the law of polarity and the law of projection.

Having done that, the concept of forgiveness also needs to be understood. .

The law of ressonance: if an object vibrates at a certain rate of vibration, everything in its vicinity that has the same vibration as a latent possibility will start vibrating at that frequency.

This law applies to everything, from subatomic to cosmic proportions. In terms of human receptivity, this means that if somebody harbour a quality or problem that we to some degree harbour ourselves, we will "resonate:" with the person, and knowledge of ourselves will thus help us knowing something about the other person.

The law of polarity: Everything around us is appreciated in opposites: We see light because we see darkness, we see beauty because we see uggliness, we see life because we see death, we see male because we se female.

The fact that our body is of one sex and one sex only, then means that our identification with this body I am a man I am a woman, means that the other half is missing, we need a partner.

The law of projection: This law was originally formulated by Carl Gustav Jung, and simply states that anything unconscious is projected.

This means, that a positive character trait I may have, but do not know I have, I will see in another person, and seeing it I will be attracted to that other person. Similarly, a negative character trait I have but don't know I have, will be veryt visible in another person, even if this other person do not harbour this trait as much as I do, and obviously, I won't like this other person.

If now, the two partners understand these laws, it is time to contemplate what is the glue in the relationship, is it love or is it need?

If it is need, the task is to be able to fill this need yourself.

If you cannot fill your own voind, the chance is that it will be difficult for you to forgive your partner even for relatively minor transgressions, let alone the big ones.

Forgiveness: No relationship that last some time will have avoided more or less servere challenges, some of which may be nasty words said under a quarrel, promises broken, money spend wrongly or against the others wish, infidelity etc. If a relationship is to survive such events, forgiveness must set in at a stage whether assisted by the therapist through a marriage counselling session or through both parties realizing that the past is over and they got married for a good reason, and that reason is love.

In our experience, forgiveness is not quite as simple as it sounds.

Forgiveness requires that you can face squarely what was said or done, that you do not block your feelings when you think about it, but that the sadness, hurt and anger is acknowledged. If the other person genuinely regrets, and you can feel that the sadness, hurt and anger is something you can face, then a forgiveness may be possible, and if that happens, often the relationship becomes better than before, maybe because it now is more real, more about how you and your partner really are and not just how you thought you and your partner were.

Sometimes guidelines as the above is enough to solve even servere problems, sometimes seeking help is a good idea. At Starbridge Centre we have 30 years of experience assisting individuals to make a change, mending dysfunctional families, marriage counselling and relationship counselling, and we have saved many relationships that were faltering, and helped many to split amicably if that was what the two wanted.